“I think you’ve already said no, which, by the way, is pretty typical. A snap decision.”

“Snap decisions are easy when the choice is obvious. I’ll find my own jobs, and I certainly didn’t ask your father to call in a favor. But what happens if I say no?”

“Oh, I’m sure the sun will come up.”

“And your parents?”

“I’m sure they’ll be disappointed.”

“And you?”

She shrugged and sipped her drink. Marriage had been discussed on several occasions but no agreement had been reached. There was no engagement, certainly no timetable. If one wanted out, there was sufficient wiggle room, though it would be a tight squeeze. But after four years of (1) dating no one else, and (2) continually reaffirming their love for each other, and (3) having sex at least five times a week, the relationship was headed toward permanent status.

However, she was not willing to admit the truth that she wanted a break from her career, and a husband and a family and then maybe no career at all. They were still competing, still playing the game of who was more important. She could not admit that she wanted a husband to support her.

“I don’t care, Clay,” she said. “It’s just a job offer, not a Cabinet appointment. Say no if you want to.”

“Thank you.” And suddenly he felt like a jerk. What if Bennett had simply been trying to help? He disliked her parents so much that everything they did irked him. That was his problem, wasn’t it? They had the right to be worried about their daughter’s future mate, the father of their grandchildren.

And, Clay grudgingly admitted, who wouldn’t be worried about him as a son-in-law?

“I’d like to go,” she said.

“Sure.”

He followed her out of the club and watched her from the rear, almost suggesting that he had time to run by her apartment for a quick session. But her mood said no, and, given the tone of the evening, she would thoroughly enjoy a flat rejection. Then he would feel like a fool who couldn’t control himself, which was exactly what he was at these times. So he dug deep, clenched his jaws together, and let the moment pass.

As he helped her into her BMW, she whispered, “Why don’t you stop by for a few minutes?”

Clay sprinted to his car.

He felt somewhat safer with Rodney, plus 9 A.M. was too early for the dangerous types on Lamont Street. They were still sleeping off whatever poison they had consumed the night before. The merchants were slowly coming to life. Clay parked near the alley.

Rodney was a career paralegal with OPD. He’d been enrolled in night law school off and on for a decade and still talked of one day getting his degree and passing the bar. But with four teenagers at home both money and time were scarce. Because he came from the streets of D.C. he knew them well. Part of his daily routine was a request from an OPD lawyer, usually one who was white and frightened and not very experienced, to accompany him or her into the war zones to investigate some heinous crime. He was a paralegal, not an investigator, and he declined as often as he said yes.

But he never said no to Clay. The two had worked closely together on many cases. They found the spot in the alley where Ramon had fallen and inspected the surrounding area carefully, with full knowledge that the police had already combed the place several times. They shot a roll of film, then went looking for witnesses.

There were none, and this was not surprising. By the time Clay and Rodney had been on the scene for fifteen minutes, word had spread. Strangers were on-site, prying into the latest killing, so lock the doors and say nothing. The liquor store-milk crate witnesses, both men who spent many hours every day in the same spot sipping cheap wine and missing nothing, were long gone and no one had ever known them. The merchants seemed surprised that there had been a shooting at all. “Around here?” one asked, as if crime had yet to reach his ghetto.

After an hour, they left and headed for D Camp. As Clay drove, Rodney sipped cold coffee from a tall paper cup. Bad coffee, from the look on his face. “Jermaine got a similar case a few days ago,” he said. “Kid in rehab, locked down for a few months, got out somehow, don’t know if he escaped or was released, but within twenty-four hours he’d picked up a gun and shot two people, one died.”

“At random?”

“What’s random around here? Two guys in cars with no insurance have a fender bender and they start shooting at each other. Is that random, or is it justified?”

“Was it drugs, robbery, self-defense?”

“Random, I think.”

“Where was the rehab place?” Clay asked.

“It wasn’t D Camp. Some joint near Howard, I think. I haven’t seen the file. You know how slow Jermaine is.”

“So you’re not working the file?”

“No. Heard it through the grapevine.”

Rodney controlled the grapevine rumors and gossip and knew more about OPD lawyers and their caseloads than Glenda, the Director. As they turned on W Street, Clay said, “You been to D Camp before?”

“Once or twice. It’s for the hard cases, the last stop before the cemetery. Tough place, run by tough guys.”

“You know a gentleman by the name of Talmadge X?”

“No.”

There was no sidewalk circus to wade through. Clay parked in front of the building and they hurried inside. Talmadge X was not in, some emergency had taken him to a hospital. A colleague named Noland introduced himself pleasantly and said he was the head counselor. In his office, at a small table, he showed them Tequila Watson’s file and invited them to look through it. Clay thanked him, certain that it had been purged and cleaned up for his benefit.

“Our policy is that I stay in the room while you look through the file,” Noland explained. “If you want copies, they’re twenty-five cents each.”

“Well, sure,” Clay said. The policy was not going to be negotiated. And if he wanted the entire file he could snatch it at any time with a subpoena. Noland took his place behind his desk, where an impressive stack of paperwork was waiting. Clay began leafing through the file. Rodney took notes.

Tequila’s background was sad and predictable. He had been admitted in January, referred from Social Services after being rescued from an overdose of something. He weighed 121 pounds and was five feet ten inches tall. His medical exam had been conducted at D Camp. He had a slight fever, chills, headaches, not unusual for a junkie. Other than malnourishment, a slight case of the flu, and a body ravaged by drugs, there was nothing else remarkable, according to the doctor. Like all patients, he had been locked down for the first thirty days and fed continually.

According to entries made by TX, Tequila began his slide at the age of eight when he and his brother stole a case of beer off a delivery truck. They drank half and sold half, and with the proceeds bought a gallon of cheap wine. He’d been kicked out of various schools and somewhere around the age of twelve, about the time he discovered crack, he’d dropped out altogether. Stealing became a way of survival.

His memory worked until the crack use began, so the last few years were a blur. TX had followed up on the details and there were letters and e-mails confirming some of the official stops along the miserable trail. When he was fourteen, Tequila had spent a month in a substance abuse unit of the D.C. Youth Detention Center. Upon his release, he went straight to a dealer and bargained for crack. Two months in Orchard House, a notorious lockdown facility for teens on crack, did little good. Tequila admitted to TX that he consumed as many drugs inside “OH” as he had on the outside. At sixteen, he was admitted to Clean Streets, a no-nonsense abuse facility very similar to D Camp. A stellar performance there lasted for fifty-three days, then he walked away without a word. TX’s note said ”... was high on crack within 2 hrs. of leaving.” The juvenile court ordered him to a summer boot camp for troubled teens when he was seventeen, but security was leaky and he actually made money selling drugs to his fellow campers. The final effort at sobriety, before D Camp, had been a program at Grayson Church, under the direction of Reverend Jolley, a well-known drug counselor. Jolley sent a letter to Talmadge X in which he expressed the opinion that Tequila was one of those tragic cases that was “probably hopeless.”